Tips and tricks for an adventurous adulthood.

Monthly Archives: October 2016

Lately, friends and family that I see occasionally—say, once or twice a year—are getting less likely to ask me if I’m dating anyone.

This conversation point used to come up reliably. Now, it seems to be sliding farther down people’s mental lists of things to enquire about.

This is good and bad. On the one hand, I sometimes get tired of the conversations with my female friends in which we endlessly deconstruct our love lives.

Those discussions can be wonderful: fulfilling, revealing, fascinating. But they can also make me feel like my girlfriends and I don’t pass the Bechdel Test—like every conversation has to come back to some dude.

On the flip side, though, when I hang out with someone and they don’t ask me if I’m seeing someone, I’m not sure how to take that.

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I had dinner with good friends recently, whom I hadn’t seen in several months. After we’d talked politics, movies, family, and work, one of them asked if I had updates about my love life. He said he didn’t want to bring up a sore subject, but was curious to hear the latest.

I told him I was happy that he’d asked. If he hadn’t, I would have felt like he’d given up on my ever finding anyone.

But as with anything involving human intimacy, it’s more complex than that.

I know people who have never, or rarely, mentioned a romantic interest in anyone, and have always deflected my occasional questions away from that zone. I don’t know if they identify as asexual/aromantic, or if there are other forces at play.

In any case, I’ve stopped asking. I do pose open-ended questions, like “So what else has been going on with you lately?” I figure that will invite any stories, romantic or otherwise, that the person wants to offer.

I know someone whose parents ask her, every time they talk, when she’s planning on getting married and having babies. That gets old too.

I also know people who have been single for years or decades, and who simply don’t get asked any more. Is that a relief? Or is it demoralizing?

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It’s a tricky balance, between asking too often and not enough, showing interest and poking a bruise.

By the time the debate started, the bartender had run out of glasses and it was standing room only. A visit from the fire department would have gotten us all (very slowly) booted out.

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I got there two hours early and scored a prime seat. On my right was Sean Marshall, a geographer, and on my left Stephen Chu, a photographer (both Canadians).

Sean’s a political aficionado who shamed me by knowing more about Massachusetts politics than I do. He watched the debate with rapt concentration.

Stephen and I kept laughing at particularly surreal moments, of which there were many (both on- and off-screen).

One newcomer standing behind us tried to order food, but the bartender said he had to be seated first. I offered up my seat. A few seconds later, he found out there was a two-hour backup in the kitchen, and gave up on eating. I got my seat back.

When Donald Trump claimed to have been endorsed by ICE, a woman sitting nearby misheard and said, bewildered, “Endorsed by ISIS?”

Several people mentioned that it was like watching a boxing match. It seemed more operatic to me, with Hillary shimmying in a moment of triumph, and Donald shaking his head, booming “Wrong,” his voice coming out almost in slow motion.

Time slowed way down and sped way up. The hour and a half was coming, was here, was gone before the bartender picked my Canadian tip off the counter.

It would have been so lonely watching this in some hotel room. In the bar, surrounded by strangers, I was surfing on top of a fragmenting glacier, melting from the past into the future.

It started when I was living in China. In the late 1990s, this was not a welcoming place to travel as a foreigner. Trains and buses ran on incomprehensible schedules. I was once sold a ticket for a train that didn’t exist.

But I loved the freedom of hopping on a bus and going to visit other Peace Corps Volunteers in a town a couple hours away.

Traveling with others can be wonderful. But you have to accommodate another person’s desires, moods, and interests. Traveling alone, I can do whatever I want, at my own pace. It’s luxurious.

It’s also lonely.

Whenever I tell people that I’m going on vacation somewhere, they ask, “Just you?” Saying yes is a point of pride with me. I want to be the kind of person who has the bravery, as well as the time and the financial and emotional resources, to hop on a plane somewhere for a few days.

It feeds my ego to see myself as an adventurer.

This Toronto trip, though, I felt my alone-ness vividly. It’s not that I was terribly isolated during my trip. I stayed in an airbnb (renting a room in a couple’s apartment), and visited with two college friends. At times I was engulfed by hundreds of humans, most notably when I watched the first Presidential debate at a bar.

I vacillated during this trip between enjoying making my own agenda and following my own whims, and wishing I had someone to share the experience with.

Being childfree and unmarried is like that too. I love my independence—I’m an American, after all, and we’re obsessed with freedom and self-direction.

There are also moments when I feel adrift in space. With a really sweet oxygen tank and a viewscreen that delivers Netflix, for sure. But still, just me in my spacesuit, floating through the galaxy.

I wonder what it would take for me to feel truly connected to others. I have great friends and family members I’m close to. Mutual love. My friends and family live all over the world.

I guess I miss the partnership I’ve felt when I’ve lived with a boyfriend in the past. Or even a great roommate. The feeling when you hear them opening the door, and you’re delighted, instead of annoyed to have your privacy violated.